Review of Mona Siddiqui, Hospitality and Islam: Welcoming in God’s Name , New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2015. 274 pages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mona Siddiqui’s latest book definitely fulfills her main intention in writing it, which is to fill a gap in the contemporary scholarship on the theme of “hospitality,” which, as she purports, has heretofore been largely neglected in writings on Islam. Of course, “hospitality” has already enjoyed at least two decades of thematic prominence in the philosophical arena (influenced especially by the work of Levinas and Derrida), and has been taken up extensively in philosophical writings on Judaism and Christianity, as well as in political philosophy. In the present work, Siddiqui fruitfully extends this thematic focus to core Islamic texts and traditions (representing primarily Sunni Islam), engaging three main senses of hospitality frequently distinguished in philosophical writings on the theme: the “host-guest” relationship, which unfolds in the intimacy of the private home; the “hoststranger” relationship, which unfolds in the socio-political sphere (especially concerning issues such as foreign travel, immigration and refugees); and inter-religious hospitality. With reference specifically to the second of these, Siddiqui does not contribute any sociological or political critique of current practice, but focuses instead on the “theological underpinnings” (p. 7) of hospitality in both the host-guest and host-stranger relationship. In terms of the third sense, inter religious hospitality, she not only points out Islam’s own textual and traditional precedents for it (beginning with Abraham), but enacts it herself in the text by engaging numerous Biblical, as well as some later Christian, articulations of the theme side-by-side with Islamic ones. She is particularly interested in the promotion of hospitality as an attitude of openness, a way of fulfillment of life and of perfection both moral and spiritual, rather than as a characterization of individual acts (whether exemplary or required). This attitude, fully realized in the figure of Abraham, structurally defines and unifies the three Abrahamic traditions (beyond the Abrahamic traditions, however, she does not extend her discussion), therein regulating relationships along a number of key lines: inside/outside, public/private, God/humanity, and male/female (to each of which is dedicated a chapter of its own).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".